Try/except for specific error of type Exception

Question

I have a certain function which does the following in certain cases:

raise Exception, 'someError'

and may raise other exceptions in other cases.

I want to treat differently the cases when the function raises Exception, 'someError' and the cases where the function raises other exceptions.

For example, I tried the following, but it didn't work as I expected.

try:
    raise Exception, 'someError'
except Exception('someError'):
    print('first case')
except:
    print ('second case')

This prints 'second case'...

Answer 1

You can look at the message property of the exception

>>> try:
...     raise Exception, 'someError'
... except Exception as e:
...     if e.message == 'someError':
...             print 'first case'
...     else:
...             print 'second case'
... 
first case

but it's pretty hacky. It'd be better to just create two separate exceptions and catch each one individually.